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Saturday, July 18, 2015

Texting ban proponent: If new laws don't improve safety, at least they make people 'feel weird'

Better late than never, the Dallas Morning News' Tom Benning offered up an assessment of research regarding the public safety benefits, or rather the lack of documentable safety benefits, from municipal ordinances banning texting and cell phone use, titled, "Do cities' texting-while-driving bans reduce crashes? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" (July 17). In a nutshell:

Texting or talking on the phone while driving is demonstrably
dangerous — a fact that’s backed up by reams of research. There’s no
denying either that cellphone use while driving can cause accidents —
Austin, even with flaws in the data, saw 70 of those wrecks in 2014
alone.

But banning the practice doesn’t necessarily reduce accidents.

A Dallas Morning News analysis
of the imperfect crash data in 12 Texas cities with cellphone rules
found no consistent reduction in distracted driving wrecks after cities
enacted bans. And that follows equally mixed reviews found by scientific
studies on statewide bans on texting or hand-held cellphone use while
driving in other states.

“It’s not clear the bans in place have
had the desired effect,” said Anne McCartt, senior vice president for
research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “There are a lot
of issues related to enforcement, data and other things, but that’s the
bottom line.”

Regular readers may recall past analyses of traffic accidents in states with texting bans. The story goes on provide this sumamry of the News' research, and others:

To see what impact these ordinances might be having, The News
analyzed Texas Department of Transportation crash data for a dozen
cities that have passed them. The data focused on wrecks in which
cellphone use or distraction was a contributing factor.

But the statistics, which rely mainly on driver accounts from the scene of a crash, raised more questions than they answered.

Several
cities saw the crash rate for cellphone-involved wrecks drop after
implementing either a texting or a hands-free ordinance. But many of
those same cities saw distracted driving crashes, which include the
cellphone incidents, actually increase.

Did the ordinance actually
reduce cellphone use? Or did it just make drivers even more leery to
admit that they had been using their phone? Or did the elimination of
one distraction behind the wheel simply lead to others?

Then some
cities saw crash rates increase after implementing new rules. Some saw
those rates go up and then go down. And some indeed saw an apparent drop
in both crash categories.

But there are many variables at play.

In
Corpus Christi, for instance, a police spokesman explained that his
city’s precipitous drop in those crash rates was likely just the result
of the fact that the department no longer fills out crash reports on
wrecks that don’t cause at least serious injury.

Despite those
challenges, some argue that such volatility adds to the need for a
statewide ban on texting behind the wheel. That would reduce confusion
drivers might face in knowing which cities have ordinances and which
ones don’t.

Proving success, however, would still be a challenge.

Scientific
studies on statewide bans have relied on insurance claims, hospital
visits or crashes overall — and then tried to control for other factors
that could affect the data. But that research ends up similarly mixed,
with some showing success and others not.

The story concludes by quoting a supporter of texting bans saying that whether they're measurably improving safety doesn't matter. Instead, it's about changing the "culture."

supporters counter that the statistics are just part of the story.

They
argue that the push against talking or texting behind the wheel is
really about creating a culture change. And for that to take hold, they
say, it means setting expectations state by state — and if need be, city
by city.

“At some point in the future, it should feel weird and
wrong to pick up a phone in the car,” said Beaman Floyd, director of the
Texas Coalition for Affordable Insurance Solutions.

Proponents sell these new criminal laws by insisting they'll save lives, and if the data showed an improvement, they'd
surely claim credit. But when traffic safety
promises fail to materialize, all of a sudden the
goal was really a "culture change" - not to measurably improve safety but to make people "feel weird and
wrong to pick up a phone in the car."

Making people "feel weird" is not a usual or appropriate function for criminal law if there's no correlated public safety benefit. If changing culture is the goal,
enforcement money would be better spent on an advertising/PR budget.

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